Ambra Health, which makes cloud-based medical image management suite, is working with Google Cloud to advance healthcare research with anonymized medical imaging data. Leveraging Google Cloud's Healthcare API, the Ambra Health Cloud PACS solution for Google Cloud allows researchers to turn data into insights by easily de-identifying patient medical imaging data for use in research studies. Leading academic medical centers are among the first research institutions to use the solution to enable machine learning research to improve patient care.

In order for researchers to use MR, CT, or PET scans for machine learning experiments, researchers typically must remove Protected Health Information (PHI) from medical imaging data — including patient name and date of birth in Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) tags. Together with the new Google Cloud Healthcare API, Ambra Health helps solve this challenge for its healthcare research customers.

Last year, Ambra Health began offering its suite of medical image management software through Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The Ambra Cloud Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) is a fully managed platform that leverages the scalable, reliable, and highly secure cloud infrastructure of GCP. Most recently, Ambra Health became an early adopter of the Cloud Healthcare API, which connects healthcare data to Google Cloud capabilities.

Among the first institutions to leverage the shared capability is an unnamed major academic medical center, which sought a secure method to view medical imaging data and collaborate with fellow researchers during the development of machine learning tools to improve patient care. Working with the new Google Cloud Healthcare API and Ambra Health Cloud PACS solution for Google Cloud, the center enabled an open source data set for global collaboration.

"The future of healthcare depends on the ability to more securely store, curate, view, and share research data," Morris Panner, CEO of Ambra Health, said in a statement. "The collaboration with Google Cloud offers opportunities for providers to work together more effectively and furthers deep learning capabilities for medical imaging."

Ambra's secure and scalable Cloud PACS makes it simple to move all research data into one single repository for easy access and viewing. Images can be viewed anytime, anywhere through the Ambra zero-footprint, web-based HTML5 DICOM viewer, which is FDA 510(k) cleared and can be used through any web browser.